ISSUE 02: A Color That Sticks With You
An emotional encounter with blue. Color as memory, as presence, as language.
There are moments when beauty doesn’t whisper. In 2020, I rounded a corner at a show and saw a piece by the artist Jae Ko, shown by Heather Gaudio Fine Art.
It was blue. But not just blue. A blue I swear I’d never seen before.
It hit me like an emotional 18 wheeler—sudden, total. I stopped short; my hand reached out without thinking, needing to touch it (I didn’t, of course, but the impulse was visceral). The surface swirled in sculptural folds, somewhere between silk and hurricane. The saturation was so intense, the room felt humid. My eyes adjusted to it the way they adjust to shadow or sunlight.
I’ve seen thousands of works in galleries and museums, but this was something different. This was a color that seemed to carry its own temperature. I never forgot it, and then I started to see it everywhere. Flash forward a year or two: I’m in Mexico City. I’m walking through one of those truly fabulous wide boulevards in Roma Norte, and the light hits a wall that’s been painted that exact same blue. And when I say exact, I mean synaptically identical. Like a mental flashbang. I stopped mid-step and just stood there, staring at the wall like it owed me something.
This is how color lives in us—it imprints. And when it returns, it doesn’t knock. It just shows up, loud and sudden.
Maybe it wasn’t exactly the same blue—maybe it was the architectural context, or the way the sun filtered through dusty glass, or the fact that I was slightly hungover and emotionally vulnerable from an overpriced mezcal tasting and being in love—but something in my brain connected. That blue from Ko’s piece and the wall in Mexico City now live in the same part of my mind, like cousins who didn’t know they were related until they met at a wedding.There is a weird intimacy to color memory. You never know when it will come for you.
Color has long been relegated to the “decorative” in the Western canon. Interestingly (and depressingly?), a recent study found that art has literally gotten less colorful over the last 200 years. Researchers analyzed over 14,000 artworks and found a steady decline in color variety and vibrancy. So if you feel like the world has become a little more gray—you’re not wrong. Maybe that's why that Jae Ko blue hit me so hard. It didn’t just stop me—it revived something. Like color as an act of resistance.
To me, color to me is often the first thing we feel before form or content registers. It works directly on the nervous system.
“Color is a power which directly influences the soul.” — Wassily Kandinsky
We’ve all had this experience: a saffron wall that makes you feel inexplicably cheery, a murky green that unsettles, a flash of neon that turns a corner into a scene. But the blue—that blue—was something else. It was interior, like an emotion I hadn’t realized was mine.
This encounter made me think about how rare it is to see a color that feels new. And how color is not just a visual experience—but a psychological one. And, in certain moments, a mildly disorienting one.
This particular blue lives in a strange aesthetic family. It’s close to Yves Klein Blue, an ultra-saturated synthetic pigment famously patented by the French artist in 1960 as International Klein Blue (IKB). Klein believed this blue could act as a portal—suspending viewers in a state of pure perception, unanchored by content.
“Blue has no dimensions, it is beyond dimensions.” — Yves Klein
Jae Ko’s piece felt like it came from that same lineage, but with its own language. Klein’s work was cool; conceptual in its remove. Ko’s was hot—textural, tactile, like blue had grown a nervous system.
It made Klein’s blue feel like the theory, whereas Ko’s felt like the emotion. That shock we feel with certain colors? It’s not just poetic. It’s physiological. According to color theorists and neuroscientists, saturated hues stimulate the retina more intensely, triggering stronger emotional reactions.
It’s why a high-impact color like cobalt or vermillion can feel like a mood, not a shade. Artists like Mark Rothko played with this tension—layering pigment to create a visual gravity. You’re not just looking—you’re being pulled in.
Jae Ko’s blue felt like that. A gravitational force.
Color is language, and like any language, it’s full of nuance, mispronunciation, regional dialects. In Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, blue represents introspection and the subconscious—a color you drift into rather than observe. Derek Jarman’s film Blue (1993) features nothing but a saturated blue screen as the backdrop to narration about illness, memory, and mortality. The color becomes a place. A life. A loss. And in the global lexicon: blue means protection in Turkey, mourning in Korea, heaven in ancient Egypt, and basically “sad but make it artful” on Tumblr.
“Blue is the only color which maintains its own character in all its tones.” — Raoul Dufy
Color, then, is not passive. It’s a participant. It lives in context, and it lives in you.
Seeing Jae Ko’s piece didn’t just show me a color. It showed me that color — and taste — can hit like déjà vu. That a pigment can be remembered before it’s fully seen.
It reminded me that aesthetic experiences don’t need to be rationalized. They’re allowed to be irrational, excessive, even dramatic (which, let’s be honest, makes them more fun!).
Taste, as I’m learning, can often be less about “refinement” and more about reaction. And color—especially that color—was my gateway back into feeling something deeply, visually, without apology.
